.
For governments as well as cooks, sanitation is a trade-off. In principle, everyone believes that kitchens should be clean, but keeping them clean may cost more than the cleanliness is worth, particularly in the absence of an immediate health threat. Epidemics of food-borne illnesses—such as hepatitis or salmonella—are infrequent. Responses to such threats occur only after rare, major, publicized food-poisoning scares. Routine poisonings, however often they may occur, are ignored by cooks, inspectors, and journalists. They are part of doing business and dining out, and rarely can be traced. Closing down an independent small business is not something that a government that embraces capitalism wishes to do. This oversight is similarly light in hospitals, nuclear plants, chemical refineries, poultry plants, and high schools, suggesting the limits to the intrusions of ideals enforced on dirty work practice by external agencies. Organizations depend on the trust of regulators and clients. This trust is typically well placed; but even when it is not, it is difficult to monitor without increased commitment.
DIVIDING LABOR IN THE KITCHEN
All occupational work is grounded in collective action and a division of labor (Becker 1974; Strauss 1991). Cooks in large kitchens are no exception, even when their work appears chaotic to the untrained eye. The haute cuisine French restaurant in this journalistic account differs only in degree from the restaurants I observed:
The pressures mount to a peak. The orders are like a barrage of machinegun fire. One has the vague feeling of a crew of white coated seamen trying to keep their ship afloat in a hurricane. The blare of noise, the figures rushing hither and thither, the irresistible chaos of enticing smells, the heat and spitting of the frying, the clang of pots, the bloomp-bloomp of chopping knives all beat down with enveloping force until one feels dizzy. Yet, in reality, everything is proceeding normally, everyone is efficiently absorbed. A boy is quickly shelling a bowl of beautiful, pink crayfish. Michel is adding a shower of bright-green sorrel to a brilliantly yellow sauce. Andre is making patterns with peach halves on a tart shell. Pierre [the head chef] watches everything and misses nothing. He could take over any job, from anyone, at any moment, and do it better. Everyone knows this and the effect is both disciplinary and exhilarating.
(De Groot, 1972, p. 246)
The same system operates in modified form at the Owl's Nest as the head chef explains: “Everyone knows what everyone is doing. Because you work together, you begin to think alike. Three people become one person. The only time I go around the kitchen is if there's a problem or somebody calls for help. Otherwise, I work at the kitchen” (Field notes, Owl's Nest). This chaos consists of “the fitting together of lines of action” (Blumer 1969), particularly when cooks collaborate on the same plate (e.g., one preparing the meat, a second, the accompaniments, and a third, the garnish).
An ideal-typical instance of the division of labor is the preparation for a banquet, which because of the number of customers to be served simultaneously requires fine-tuned organization, overseen by authority. The head chef at the Blakemore Hotel described the banquet setup at a large hotel at which he had once worked:
I was in the banquet kitchen. It was a fantastic setup…. The people who worked in the evening would come in, and they would set up the entire breakfast and the entire lunch for the next day. And put their meals out for that evening. You came in the morning, your eggs were cracked, your bacon was set out, everything was ready to slide in the oven, to put on the plates. And then you would set up the dinner for them in the evening. So when they came in, their vegetables were ready to be warmed up, they may even be half-cooked. It was just a matter of putting them in the steamer for six minutes and get[ting] them back to temperature and out they'd go. The steaks would all be scored off and on a tray.7 Another example of banquet cooking: When you cook up a banquet with steaks, you go to your broiler which you have for a la carte, but instead of cooking it, you just score it, put the lines on it. You put them back on a sheet pan and put them back in the refrigerator. Then fifteen minutes before they're to be served, you slide them in the oven to finish cooking to get them back to the temperature.
(Personal interview, Blakemore Hotel)
Even though some might see cooking as a solitary activity only mediated by the food itself, professional cooking, like many occupations embedded within organizations, demands teamwork and coordination, particularly in restaurants that attempt complex presentations. The work team is as much the unit of analysis as is the individual worker.
The division of labor is not a given but must be negotiated with more or less strain. Flexibility is, of course, desirable, but when interests diverge or when communication is ineffective, tension results as workers have different ideas of what is expected of them and their colleagues.
FLEXIBILITY IN A COMMUNITY OF INTEREST
One means by which a division of labor becomes flexible is through explicit or implicit expectations of direct and reciprocal cooperation. Even though a division of labor exists in midsize restaurant kitchens, this is negotiable in practice. As noted in numerous descriptions of the informal organization of occupations, workers perform each other's jobs and cover for each other. They do so willingly because they assume that later this cooperation will be reciprocated. The articulated structure of the kitchen need not be repeatedly negotiated, because of an unstated assumption that others will be available for future aid. Flexibility is built into institutional relations of co-workers. Cooperation is required, and when it is not easily given, there is surprise and tension. A lack of cooperation demands an account. For an occupation to operate efficiently, a community of interest is assumed, which makes patterns of aid flow through a network without a specific debt and obligation incurred.
In smoothly functioning organizations, workers are socialized to believe that asking for help is both expected and desired. In kitchens this is explicit in occupational rhetoric, but elsewhere mutual aid may be more sub rosa. As the head chef at the Owl's Nest comments to his workers, “Don't be afraid to ask for help.” A fellow cook chimes in, “It's always easier to ask for help before you get in the shits” (Field notes, Owl's Nest). When describing the kitchen as a work community, I note that this instrumental cooperation is tethered to expressive friendships and perquisites—cooks getting drinks from the bar, dishwashers being served steaks, and servers eating fancy desserts. A “favor bank” operates in most occupational worlds.
Perhaps cooperation in the kitchen is most dramatically evident in the surprising reality that cooks regularly work unpaid overtime to help peers. Day cooks often choose to finish tasks that they have not completed during their paid hours to prevent inconvenience to the evening staff. Evening workers routinely remain until everyone has finished cleaning up, even though only one of them—or none—is paid for that time. A breakfast cook at the Blakemore Hotel regularly arrived an hour early to complete his assigned work. A norm of community lightens the establishment's labor costs, but this norm can disintegrate if workers believe that management is consciously manipulating their fellowship for profit.
THE TENSION OF DIVISION
Although cooperation is far more frequent than the lack of it (Gross 1958, p. 387), anyone who has worked in kitchens can attest that they are not settings of eternal harmony. Yet, in my observation, emotional displays are rare, not the rule. As a result, whereas emotional outbursts in kitchens are notable when they occur, they typify the scene for outsiders.
In one tense restaurant a kitchen staff meeting diffused much interpersonal annoyance through negotiation and clarification:
The structural positions of the cooks were clarified by the chef in response to the complaint of Larry, a cook, who claimed that “we used to know what was expected.…I got upset. I walked off the line. I was upset about what was happening…. People don't know what they should do.” The problem was a function of role ambiguity: the role of the “middleman” (aka the “slouch cook,” or “swing cook”)—a “backup” for the other cooks. After Paul, the head chef, detailed how the middleman should collaborate with the broiler cook and the stove cook, the tension lessened. That evening every cook made a special effort to demonstrate publicly that [he or she] could cooperate. Each man pointedly commented to me privately on how effective the meeting was. As Larry explained, by the end of that evening: “I felt a lot more relaxed and a lot more free.